Finding Vivian Maier

I’ve been following the story of Vivian Maier for a while and finally blocked out the hour and a half it takes to watch the documentary film Finding Vivian Maier…

I was not disappointed!

Vivian is a woman whose lifelong career as a nanny and housekeeper gave no clue as to the depth of emotion and humanity that her photography would reveal.

The Vivan Maier website sums it up best in the words of Winston Churchill…

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

As she moved around the cities of New York and later Chicago, she would amass over 100,000 photographs in her lifetime. Her intimate photographs depict the daily lives of people in touching and surprising ways…

Toward the end of her life she fell on rather rough times and three of the children she had cared for pooled their resources to rent an apartment and make sure that she was cared for. Unbeknownst to them a rented storage facility, filled with boxes of her photographs and films, fell to auction for unpaid fees. The contents of all of the boxes were sold to auction houses in Chicago resulting in the discovery of her amazing portfolio.

John Maloof, the man who bought the untold numbers of rolls of undeveloped film and has given years to research and increase awareness of her work is the director of the documentary.

children are prominent…

she arranges self-portraits with mirrors and windows…

Maloof speculates that she was able to capture her close-up, intimate photographs partly because she was using a box camera. Since she would have been looking down into the viewfinder and not directly into her subject’s eyes perhaps it did not “invade their space.” At any rate, she was successful…

I highly recommend setting aside the hour and half block of time to learn more about this mysterious and amazing woman!